I think I agree (provisionally) that we, arriving to the tradition from somewhere else, are not part of the tradition. But then I wonder...

I recall Janis Joplin saying something to the effect that she would hardly have dared sing the blues (in her definition that would mean R&B) were it not that blacks had abandoned the blues wholesale, and she felt the songs were too good to be left unheard. Some may feel that was hubris on her part, but I think the remark is valid, and addresses what several have said above: when the "folk" have left tradition behind, when they're happy performing hip-hop, salsa, swamp rock, you name it, then what?

I'm just wondering how time-bound our viewpoint may prove to be. Mistakenly or not, will our descendants regard our strongly self-conscious folkie generation as just another blip in a long line of ever-changing tradition that proceeds onward into future centuries, reinventing itself as it goes?

In other words, can tradition jump the rails? Can it survive its transition from among the "traditional people" -- the Harry Coxes, the Texas Gladdens, those to whom these songs were the fabric of a working life -- into transmission via record, book, internet and any future means we think up? Can it survive blended into the minds of people for whom it is not native?

What if it can't? Then what? Is tradition at an end? Or is it part of a larger continuum in which songs will continue to diversify and be varied, even if no longer in a media-free geographically continuous community? If I'm a spaceman on the Earth-to-Mars cargo run in 2087 and I sing "Barbara Allen" to while away the time, having learned it from my uncle who learned it from a friend who learned it from a Library of Congress recording by Rebecca Tarwater of Tennessee (and especially if the song has changed in transmission through forgetfulness or deliberate variation), am I in the tradition or not?

The components of the traditional community change, and are always going to change. I am pretty sure traditional singers did not at first take kindly to the songs of the industrial revolution -- "Peg and Awl," "Wark o' the Weavers," pick what examples you like (not to mention the ancient "Long Pegging Awl"). They must have thought them a clear break from the old ballads, village dances like "Skip to My Lou" and "Elsie Marley", agricultural songs, and general songs based on that milieu -- "Green Bushes," "Devilish Mary," etc. At first they must have thought them a disagreeable, or at least trivial, novelty that could never join the magic circle of the real old "love songs" etc. But as time went on, their repertoires included both. And the circumstances of life, how different: gritty streets of coal mining towns, as distinct as can be from the old cabin in the green and leafy (but somewhat eroded) holler. (And yet the two environments are cheek by jowl in the American south and around places like Swansea in Wales, and inhabitants may sing both sorts of songs indifferently.)

What is our present-day community? Broadly speaking, the city and the suburbs, with cell phones and the internet. There is no tradition in the usual sense. The office environment produces little or no song. So does that mean tradition is over, was a one-time occurrence, a kind of natural resource like oil that is now depleted and cannot be continued or reconstructed?

But when today's office and convenience store workers and hamburger flippers go home to their electronic village, download Mudcat, learn songs, share them with friends, sing them at songfests, learn more about their provenance, gradually make them part of their own consciousness, is there no possibility whatever that this may be the jumping-off place for a new lease on life that in time may amount to tradition? I would not bet against it.

In a broad sense I think tradition goes on forever, and even the media, though never at its heart, may accidentally become part of it -- as when folksingers appeared on the Hootenanny shows in the 60s -- New Lost City Ramblers singing "Down By the Sea Shore," say, or the innumerable BBC shows featuring authentic singers as well as the modern interpreters who learned from them.

Is tradition, perhaps, whatever propagates itself among people beneath and despite the authorized, imposed culture of official entertainment (American Idol, say)? Is traditional song an irrepressible force that rises from below, a counterculture in a sense? Not every upstart song that exerts uncanny power becomes traditional (Buffalo Springfield's unforgettable "For What It's Worth" has its feet in both worlds but will never be folk). But some do, and I'm guessing some always will.

In the end I guess my plea is for an open-ended definition of tradition that sees it as a continuity going on into the future, changing its circumstances (and yes, its definitions of community), but unending.

Unless we blow ourselves up, of course. Then it will have to start with some other organism on some other planet.

Bob